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Article: 2331 of alt.conspiracy.jfk.moderated
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From: jmcadams@netcom.com (John Mcadams)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk.moderated
Subject: Mercer Documents 7 /Henry Hurt Account
Date: 21 Sep 1996 22:18:12 -0500
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Henry Hurt, "Reasonable Doubt" (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1985), pp.114-116:
There are significant variations in the official reports of what hap-
pened to Miss Mercer. She was not called by the Warren Com-
mission, and her account was ignored in its report. The House Select
Committee was interested in her story but was not able to find her.
Miss Mercer was located in the course of investigation and research
for this book and, in return for a promise not to reveal her current
name or location, granted an interview to the author in 1983. She
provided the following account of the events of November 1963:
A little before 11:00 A.M., on the day of the assassination, Miss
Mercer, who was twenty-three years old, was driving west on Elm
Street, just beyond the spot where the President would be killed
in less than two hours. A few yards beyond the triple underpass,
Miss Mercer brought her car to a stop. A green truck was blocking
her lane, sitting partly on the curb.
As Miss Mercer waited -- perhaps as long as three minutes --
a young man got out of the passenger's side of the truck and went
around to the rear. He opened the long tool compartment on the
side of the truck. According to Miss Mercer, he removed a package
that she believed was a rifle wrapped in paper. The young man
walked up the embankment in the direction of the grassy knoll area
with the package. That was the last time Miss Mercer saw him.
However, as she waited and then tried to move her car around
the truck, Miss Mercer's eyes locked with those of the man behind
the wheel. She was able to look at him clearly. He was heavily built
with a round face. Miss Mercer edged her car by the truck and
continued toward Fort Worth, where she was employed. (A War-
ren Commission document, disclosed later, showed that a police
officer on the scene had observed apparently the same truck and
believed it to be a legitimate breakdown.)
Miss Mercer said that she stopped to have breakfast at a Howard
Johnson's restaurant on the toll road to Fort Worth. She often stopped
there and was casually acquainted with the employees and regular
customers, including policemen who regularly used the restaurant.
When she entered the restaurant that day, she commented openly
to several people that "the Secret Service is not very secret." She
mentioned seeing the man with the rifle going up the embankment.
Soon after Miss Mercer left the restaurant, two police officers who
had heard her comments pursued her car and pulled her over. They
stated that it was necessary for them to take her back to Dallas.
Once in the police car, Miss Mercer learned that the President had
been shot at Dealey Plaza, the location where she had seen the man
with the rifle.
Once back in Dallas, Miss Mercer was taken to the sheriff's office,
where, for the next four or five hours, she was interrogated off and
on by policemen and men in civilian clothes whom she believed to
be federal investigators. She states that she was never shown a badge
or any sort of identification by any of the men. She repeated her
story many times before finally being driven home.
At four o'clock the following morning, men came to her apartment
and showed FBI identification. She accompanied them back to the
sheriff's office, where they showed her a dozen or so photographs,
asking her to pick out any she thought might be of the men she saw
Friday morning. She selected two pictures. Miss Mercer had no
idea of the men's identities.
On Sunday morning, the day after Miss Mercer made the iden-
tification, she was watching the assassination coverage on television
with friends and saw Ruby shoot Oswald. Instantly, she shouted
that they were the two men she had seen on Friday and had iden-
tified for the FBI. Ruby, she said, was the driver and Oswald the
man with the rifle.
If true, Julia Mercer's identification of Jack Ruby preceding his
murder of Oswald would have introduced a new twist to the official
FBI version of the assassination. The revelation not only would have
suggested a rifleman on the grassy knoll, but would have shown an
FBI interest in Ruby in connection with the killing of Kennedy.
It is not surprising that Miss Mercer's claim is not backed up by
any official reports of the incident.
Some years later, when Miss Mercer saw the official reports, she
was aghast. The FBI, in its report of the Mercer interview, omitted
her asserted identification of Jack Ruby as the driver of the Truck.
It also reported that even though Miss Mercer was shown pictures
of Oswald, she was unable to identify him. The sheriff's department
report included a statement attributed to Miss Mercer to the effect
that she did not see the driver clearly enough to be able to identify
him. Miss Mercer adamantly denounces the reports as corruptions
and fabrications by the FBI and the sheriff's department of her actual
experiences. Miss Mercer is one of many other witnesses who claim
discrepancies between what was told to the authorities and what
later appeared in the official reports.
----------------------------------------------------
It seems we have a *major* enhancement of her story here.
She now identified Oswald as the man carrying the rifle up the hill
toward the Grassy Knoll.
Not a minor matter, is it?
.John